Flaked

A good portrait of a fallen man and the place he has fallen into. Promising--but also frustrating.

If you’re willing to go along with the show’s carefully conceived aimlessness, it has the pull of a book of inter-connected short stories.

When the plot finally kicks in in the back half of the season, the unexpected shift in tone is intended to show how Chip’s apparently pointless life is the result of outside forces, but the series of twists (one clumsily telegraphed, the other a bit less so) don’t so much fill out the character as underscore how thin he was in the first place.

Quality-wise, Flaked slots right in the middle of the pack. It is not as original, lacerating, or self-aware as Louie and Girls, the progenitors of this trend, or as good as Transparent, the perfector of it, but it contains a deep and precise character sketch.... Flaked is irritating exactly to the extent that it takes Chip’s plight too seriously.

The series gets more substantive and quicker starting in Episode 6, but over all the pieces--man-boys on the prowl, bromance, occasional forays into seriousness--fit together uncomfortably.

Flaked is another horrid post-Togetherness drama-com that's too cute to be serious and too lame to be funny. [11 Mar 2016, p.78]

Flaked has the stylings of a TV comedy--meandering and lazily plotted, it doesn't work as drama--yet actual humor is all too absent.... This is disappointing, because what Arnett and Flaked do well, they do better than they ought.

[Netflix's Love] at least felt fresh and directed in the way it surgically examined the tropes of the romantic comedy. It was a character study that had a purpose, explaining through its run why we were watching these characters to begin with. Flaked never answers that question.

By episode six, Flaked throws a real curve that’s nearly worth seeing through to the end, as Arnett’s performance deepens and the show becomes something more than just an excuse to loaf. The problem is getting there.

Flaked offers up weak jokes and even weaker drama, as later episodes pile on contrived, overwrought plot twists.

Flaked, created by Arnett and Mark Chappell, is just another exasperating exploration of stunted white male adulthood.

It's a leaden, soggy mess, that only gets messier as it goes.

There are a couple of love triangles at work, but the characters have been written only in terms of metaphor and irony, so nobody has any chemistry, which is probably also an irony, though it's less likely to be intentional. Or maybe it is intentional? Flaked feels primarily like a writing exercise for Arnett and Chappell.

Arnett’s personal appeal does help the pointless series from time to time, but it just as often exacerbates the hollowness of it. The whole man-child thing is getting old.